Congrats on your marriage and kudos for wanting to help your step-son. I would just make sure it is really what your step-son wants and have him buy into the process every step of the way.
There is a fine line between being helpful and being controlling, which many parents deal with. I think it’s great you want to help but you are also talking about a high level of stress. My son went to a low performing high school. His physics teacher slept during class. He and two friends taught themselves and did well, and he is now an engineer. Motivation and hard work needs to come from your stepson, and as a new stepdad it could get dicey if you try to supply both means and motivation 
Agree with those who ask for more details about where stepson is currently at. But I also agree that time and resources spent on a motivated child will produce meaningful results.
But I recall when my nephew, then 5, told his grandfather, who was himself an engineer, that he wanted to become an engineer, too! “It must be fun driving those big long choo choo trains!”
If you can afford tutoring and your SS is willing to invest time and efforts into this project - go for it. He may or may not achieve his goal becoming an engineer but he should greatly improve his math competency. There are many other good jobs that require math skills. Maybe he will be able to take some math and stats courses in college while majoring in some softer major. Many employers do look at transcript.
My personal experience trying to teach math to my daughter who finally begged for help junior year when SAT started looming was not that good. I was able to considerably increase her SAT score but could not improve her “math culture”. What was missing during elementary school years could not be undone - she can never become an engineer. In general, in math everyone has his own ceiling. I did know when I hit mine.
If you hire a tutor make sure that he teaches him real math and not just SAT tricks.
- Where is his dad, and does he get a vote in your new scheme of "fix up the deficient kid"?
- Have you sat mom and son down to say "wow, help me know what my role is here regarding school"?
- Because you sound more like "wow! aren't you lucky I'm here to save your lousy efforts!"
The most important way to help teens is let them lead. Ask questions, offer solutions, back it up with your time and money — but especially as a stepparent, I would wade into this slowly, and with minimal demands. Maybe offer to help with math homework yourself, or find an engineering camp for summer, But keep your kitchen sink. 16 is pretty young to know much of anything – he may well decide to be an English major, or a physical therapist, or an electrician. Breathe. Relax.
Somewhere on CC there is a teen who is saying - my mom just got remarried, and my stepdad seems like a nice enough dude, but he’s making my mom feel ashamed of the schools that I went to when that was the best she could do as a single parent. He’s got a lot of money and he seems really interested in my being an engineer. I’m glad for his support but I’m afraid he’s going to have expectations I can’t meet.
Just be sensitive to how this whole situation comes across to your stepson.
What does your wife think of this? What input has she given? She knows her son better than you - does she has a sense as to whether his comment about being an engineer was serious or offhand? She knows his motivation, his work ethic / study style. We don’t.
I agree with greenbutton, let the child lead. This boy suddenly says he wants to be an engineer. Why? Is it because you are one? If so, then let him shadow you for a couple of days so he knows what an engineer does. Have him talk to engineers and find out what he needs to learn and accomplish in order to reach this goal. Chances are, if math is his weakest area he won’t want to pursue a career; he’ll want to build on his strengths.
Throwing the kitchen sink tends to be more harmful than helpful. As a teen, if my mother’s new husband signed me up for “a private tutor, math weekend courses, SAT prep this summer, and an engineering student mentor at the local university”, I’d shut down immediately.
You obviously want to be helpful. Hiring a tutor to improve his math skills, if he is struggling in his current classes, is reasonable. If he is a junior taking Algebra II and on track to take honors pre-calc and getting A’s and B’s, then a private tutor to push him ahead is unhelpful.
He doesn’t necessarily have to be a math star in high school to be an engineer, but he does need a solid math base. If that means going to community college for a year or two, that can be a great option. IMO, it’s far better to go more slowly so he can really learn and understand math than throwing every thing at him and hoping for a “sharp improvement”.
Ask him if he is willing to take ACT after the holidays. He can study for it during winter break. if he is cooperative - great, you will have the baseline after the results come in (ask for the score report).
As other posters have said, we need more details. Specifically, what level math he is in currently, his grades in math, his sophomore math PSAT (if he took it). Improving one’s math skills is not going to hurt no matter what the student ends up majoring in. From my experience, a kid who has math aptitude but just got stuck in poor quality math classes, will be an easier fix than a kid with poor math aptitude and lacking much background info.
That’s why we need more info…
I have/had kids in “average” public schools. My middle son, who showed an early interest/talent for engineering, is now a pre-law student. He had a high enough ACT score to get a free ride to our local state university and has a good chance to go on to a much more prestigious law school with his very high GPA. Again, he was interested in engineering at first, but completely changed his mind. Just have your step son do his best, get into a school with a variety of majors and let the chips fall…
@Stepdad15 - It’s great that you care. If your step son is on board with your kind offers to help, this group can help advise.
What I would do is to say to Stepson, that if he wants to be an engineer, at a minimum he needs to take Calculus senior year and four years of science, hopefully honors. Where is he in the Math curriculum? Did he take Algebra 9th grade? If so, he needs to double up on Math this year or take pre-calc over the summer. Once you get your son’s buy in, talk to the guidance counselor/Math Dept head about how to do this.
I don’t agree that you need calculus senior year if you want to be an engineer. It would certainly help, but is not required at many schools. I do think you need to be in precalc senior year, but having had calculus is a bonus, not a requirement for most colleges. FWIW, the normal track at my kids high school does not have kids taking calculus senior year and it is considered to be a very good high school.
Although students who have the opportunity to take calculus while in high school should do so, calculus while in high school is not required to go into engineering, although a strong knowledge of algebra, geometry, and trigonometry in high school is necessary to be ready for calculus in college. Sample schedules for engineering at the vast majority of colleges in the US start math at calculus 1.
In terms of science, he should certainly take all three of biology, chemistry, and physics while in high school, with particular attention to physics.
One option no one has mentioned:
After you resolve all that stuff about whose idea it really is, how much your stepson really knows, and whether he is really motivated, etc., it may still be a challenge to get him to the point where he can be accepted into an engineering program in one year – and that’s all that you have. You have 1-1/2 years to get him to the point where he can succeed in an engineering program, and that may be tight, too, but you pretty much have 13 months to assemble a credible application.
Or not. If this were something I was doing, I would try to sit with my stepson and to develop a plan for becoming an engineer. And the plan should be one that does not rely on miracles to work. Which may mean, depending on where he is realistically today, that he needs more than 13 months before applying to engineering school, and more than 18 months before starting an engineering program.
So give him more time. Make a plan to delay high school graduation, or to take a gap year, or to do a post-grad year at another school, or to build a 5- or 6-year degree flightpath that starts with community college, or to look for a university where he can transfer into engineering after a first year getting up to speed. There are lots of ways to approach relaxing the time constraint, in in the context of an entire career the modest delay won’t mean a thing. Also, your stepson’s willingness to consider ideas like that may give you a sense of how committed he is to engineering.
I want to second @JHS’s thoughtful post #34.
There are many community colleges with agreements with flagship universities. Students can take the pre-engineering program at CC then transfer all or most of credits through the program to the designated college.
I know many students took this path and have engineering careers.
IMHO, the best approach is to have your stepson start off by doing extra problems (beyond what is assigned by the teacher) from his textbook. In fact, I would encourage him to do all the problem sets at the end of each chapter. The more problems you do in Math, the better you become…practice makes perfect! If you do a wide array of math problems, you start to realize that there is a process to doing mathematics and once you master that “process”, you can replicate it across the board (including physics and engineering).
Your son can become a top math student just by practicing math on a consistent basis. I don’t think the kitchen sink approach will be that effective unless he is motivated to go beyond doing the bare minimum.
Whatever you do out of love will always be rewarded, engineering career or not, which a secondary aspect here.
If he’s “suddenly seized with wanting to be an engineer,” it sounds like the first (and maybe last) step should be giving him a chance to find out more about the field – perhaps by job-shadowing some engineers and talking with them about their work and the academic preparation needed for it. He may then decide that he wants to pursue the idea further or he may conclude that it’s not for him.
Next month, he might be suddenly seized with wanting to be a teacher or a writer or a military officer. Some young people are like that – they try out different potential occupations in their heads until one seems to fit.
I’m not the driving force behind the interest in engineering, but if that interest is the vessel that encourages him to “up his game” in math & science, so be it. I did send him to a 5 day day camp in August.
As many of you said, strength in math will not only provide confidence, it will boost his SAT, and is applicable across many college concentrations. I do not care what he pursues.
He’s at a vastly more demanding school as of two months ago. I don’t have his test numbers, but the pre-SAT math score was more or less reflective of the previous school district.
He’s currently in Alg II as an 11th grader. “Throwing the kitchen sink” at this is an expression of providing lots and lots of support to make up for so much lost ground and because college apps would be due in 1 year.